Harrison Ford has been flexing both his dramatic and comedic skills playing a therapist on Shrinking, but the iconic actor says he struggled with his own mental health issues earlier in his life.
Ford recently admitted that his depression got so bad during his time at Ripon College in Wisconsin that he “rarely ventured out” of his room, often only getting out of bed to order a pizza.
“On the rare occasion I did go to the classroom, I would often touch the door on the outside of the building and turn around and walk back,” the 83-year-old star said on the new episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast. “I was more than depressed. I think I was ill. I was socially ill, psychologically not well.”
Harrison Ford in 1973’s’American Graffiti’
Credit: Screen Archives/Getty
Things began to get better for Ford when he was looking for a way to boost his grade point average. He “accidentally” enrolled in a class called “drama” without even reading the full explanation of the course.
“It started out in the description talking about reading and analyzing plays, but I didn’t read the part where it said that you had to actually be in them as well, so that was a surprise,” Ford said. “I’d never done anything like that. And I was surprised that the people that I had considered to be fellow geeks and misfits were, in fact, some of the most interesting people I knew. They were doing something that I hadn’t really understood, and they were telling stories about life, and some of them were exceptional in their capacity to understand human behavior.”
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Ford would eventually become one of the biggest actors of his generation, but he wasn’t an overnight success. He plugged away in Hollywood for more than a decade, famously working on the side as a professional carpenter, before 1977’s Star Wars propelled him to superstardom.
“I think I simply found my place amongst storytellers,” Ford recalled of his college class. “It really changed my world, changed my life.”
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